TRH pt 4: Rescue From Without
by teddybowties
Summary: Revelations are made. The Doctor disappears. Due to this, the Master is not a happy camper. We top this decadent dessert with a fistful of 22-1-12-5-25-1-18-4.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter One: 24

"… don't you harm him, you hairy little troll!" the Master yells, tearing a bleeding strip from his platinum hair. His fingers knuckle his scalp in frustration as the mouth of the gun crawls closer to the Time Lord in tweed slumped halfway against his leg and the corner of the Green Pagoda, limp hands plastered loosely backward over face and stomach as though confused on the order. "Harm him and you harm me."

Jack Harkness' smile holds the barren glaze of a beady eyed shark as he continues on leveling the gun toward Benjamin Pond. "Well then," he says, shoving the barrel of his shiny webley into Benjamin's shoulder- the same shoulder he plumbed that day in Martha and Mickey's kitchen, "I guess it's a two for one special."

His finger curls lovingly, then-

Bang.

In a spectacular spray of gore from such a small exit wound, bits of shoulder curtain the floor behind the swimming dragons and flying fish that decorate the carved green curves of the Jade Pagoda.

And so, much like the TARDIS, the Pagoda, too, now wears her special lipstick, like a badge.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two: Bait and Switch

"I swear, what do I have to do to get some food around here?" the Doctor moans, turning a white corner outside the Master and Rassilon's impromptu meeting room.

He sighs; it's the very same white corner he's been turning for quite a while now. Back and forth. Waiting. He knows what they're discussing- he also knows he wants no part of it. Not that he can't hear exactly what the two men are exchanging jabs about behind the door. It's just that…

Clink. Gloosh-slosh. Clink-link.

A frosty can rolls across his foot. It feels cold; condensation trickles in little wet cords of icy water that grip his naked foot and trail frosty ivy down to the dark stone floor. This corridor, he decides as he rubs his robe down over his bigger-since yesterday waist, bends to retrieve the can and turns the corner yet again, was decorated by a professional.

"Obviously, the author of this decor is a genius," he says aloud as he walks, enjoying with fresh appreciation the coolness of the black black stones beneath his feet, "… black floor white walls, oh yes, the duality is quite nice. Although, a bipolar hummingbird seems nice, too... they usually are- until they eat your Chihuahua."

Abruptly, tickling feathers erupt across his neck, as though the walls are giggling. Perhaps they are, he reasons, looking about the hallway for the billionth time.

Delightfully, there is an aberrant space- or rather lack thereof, a few footsteps down the way, on the right. It seems to be full of…

Vending Machine?

Ah. So that's how it is.

"Why, my angel! You're just what I've been looking for!" says the Doctor, rubbing his stomach and throwing up his hands as he makes a great show of assuming the position before the time-honoured dispenser of goodies. "And we've got to figure out where little Flamina's TARDIS is, yes we do!" He rubs his small stomach again, scratching thick yet lanky fingers left and right over his shirt this time.

The boxy fat machine quivers, shivering her metal timbers in their moorings; an earthquake-ridden house.

Any moment now, the Doctor reasons, there will be a shower of rivets and shavings… he's never had much luck with these things.

He waits, leaning against the wall with one foot out and the other crossed over his knee. His pale fingernails tap softly against the white surface, beating out the rhythm to another one of those songs he helped the Beatles write, Eleanor something.

One hand scuffles in the left-hand, endless pocket of his dark grey, pinstriped trousers (the shirt he's wearing beneath his robe is pinstripey too; he wonders if that was wise), as if for change, and green eyes avert themselves, lest they draw attention.

He waits.

As if summoned, a clink arrives against the little black bar along the bottom of the vending machine. Behind the glass, a chilled sausage tin chinks soothingly, back and forth. Back and forth.

Chink.

Rollll.

Chink-chink.

The Doctor's peridot gaze drifts down over the blue-papered tin for a moment- but there's something he wants to do first. So he fits his hand against the side of the machine and rubs, a hormone-warmed touch against warm metal. Soon, his fingers feel the papery smooth crunch of a peeling label, so he cranes his neck.

The long, rectangular bluish sheet of fading plastic reads:

Littlerose Vending & Co, a SUBSIDIARY OF ROSS-ALET SUPPLY SERVICES.

"Ah, I see," he murmurs, giving the machine's wide side a last thick pat before returning to the glass window in front. "A double whammy- and apparently the Fates like roses!"

The hum from the mechanisms that keep the thing running begins to grow a bit louder. He listens.

Hummm.

Hummm.

Hummm.

He bends down carefully, one hand on the side of the box-shaped chassis, one hand poised near the black bar where the goodies come out. He sticks a hand in, retrieves the cool tin.

He remembers the first one; it's still in his pocket, just where he put it. He rescues it as he straightens, worming his way back up again with the one hand and now an elbow, leaning the awkward majority of his weight on the vending machine's thick black and white frame.

One little push and a bit of swaying back and forth, and he's upright again. At the effort, air is pulled from his lungs and passed his teeth, despite himself. With the cold, cold can under his arm, he reaches out to touch the machine again, patting it for a third time.

"Now, that was nice of you, sweetheart," he says, examining the can, which shows a hologram of an orange, and the tin, which also sports holographics, albeit of sausages in running shoes.

He turns the tin over and over in his fingers, wide eyes peeled on every glint of metal.

A thunk issues from the inner workings this time, followed by a crinkly thump, and soon he's holding a clear packet of dried vegetable crisps in blue, red, green, orange and purple.

"Oooh, the salty ones, with the purple carrots!" he exclaims, scratching his nose as he looks on the vending machine with newfound respect. "You're a peach, my pet. But listen, someone's coming. Best be off. See you soon!"

He pats the machine again, then turns away and walks down the corridor with the crisp packet between his teeth. He turns a corner, and…

A swish of green robes slams into his chest, crunching his crisps.

"Oh! I'm sorry, sir!" says a slim olive hand as it crawls out from a pile of mouldy old books, "Errand for Lord Pasmodius!"

Then the student, short white hair, green eyes and all, scurries down the hallway where the vending machine was.

As he turns, however, the Doctor sees no girl running down the long hall, and still more intriguing, no vending machine in the small nook. With a soft pat to the trouser pocket he –had- been keeping the Rose Ring in, he allows himself the tiniest of smiles.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three: Quick, Kill It Before It Breeds

"… so let me get this… straight, Pasmodius," the Master says, swishing the end of the Sash of Rassilon in his cocoa mug with a pointed look at the old man's mostly toothless maw, "… -the Doctor- was the head archivist for Gallifreyan Central Intelligence? What the hell did they have you people do, spy on Borusa blowing bubbles in his bathtub?"

A tiny female snort from behind- probably Borusa, hopefully, "… watch yourself, boy. You may wear the mantel of Lord President, but I still have my Giant Ruler of Rassilon."

The Master turns, blinking, and a smile grows on his stubbly face." You know, little girl, I think you need an all-day sucker, and I don't mean an ice lolly."

"Don't be vulgar, young man, or I'll…" Borusa stops, her young ears tweaking to some sound in the hall.

"I wasn't, Bimbo Smurf. But I didn't hear you anyway. My Imprimatur doesn't translate Raptor Jesus."

"What is this ice lolly, Lord President?" queries Pasmodius, ignoring the rising voices in favour of rubbing his wrinkled chin as though trying to discern the fairer fruit at a market stall.

"Well, it's what I call Raptor Jesus, I mean the Doctor, when he's not here, you know!" the Master covers his face with an aside palm, looks around, then whispers, "…when he's out being… fat and stuff!"

"I'm not fat, Koschei. Who has been spreading these malicious rumours? You know I've never ah, stolen anything except the TARDIS, and she stole me! Now what's all this about me taking things from the old Museum?" comes the softly Northern, rather threatening voice of the man in question from nowhere in particular, his dangerous hyper-enunciations sliding like bits of shattering iceberg into the sudden sea of silence the mood in the room has become.

Then the grayish exit door slides open, revealing no reassuring bowtie below the Doctor's strong chin. Above that, the ever calculating lips curving in just precisely the wrong way. Atop the downturn of those reddish lips, a scrunching, hawkish huge perfect nose more annoying than a check engine light, this set by two bleary, bloodshot peridot eyes a little too purpled and baggy underseat.

"Calm down. You missed some important diplomatic-type talkings yesterday, Moron," the Master quips, glaring dark eyes at the comfy soft grey lounge chair he's just vacated. As he looks, he realizes it's closer to the Doctor than himself now, and the small, devious kernel of an adolescent prank forms in the hindmost thick of his massive brain. "Where were you?"

The Doctor sighs, puffing out his cheeks, then raises a hand to his forehead, holding his face down like a floppy dog as though out of sheer tiredness but really just his usual malaise. "Oooh goodie, comfy chair!" he cries, suddenly quite animate, squeaking and perking slightly as he curls a finger at the four-legged lump of grey softness and telekineses it in his direction.

The tapered dark chair legs begin to screech toward him-

Screeeeech.

Screeeeech.

Soon, so soon, the chair will be within his grasp.

Screeeeech.

The Doctor reaches down to squish the lovely fluffy rise of seat in back, then cracks his neck as he turns to sit.

His body bends over itself, preparing to clutch the chair arms and ease into position, when a rush of air blows against his legs. But then an arm clutches the back, pushing the chair away.

"Goodness," says Borusa, covering her bright eyes as the Doctor stumbles backward, his parental death glare -of death- glinting tiger yellow even as the same arm that took back the chair wraps around his shoulder and strains, easing him to the floor.

"-My- chair." says the Master, dropping the heavy gold rectangle links of the Sash of Rassilon directly down onto the Doctor's rabbit brown head with the hand he didn't use. "Sit boy."

Two golden, murderous cat's eyes glow out from beneath the shadowing thick bars of the Sash. But then the crunch of cellophane follows, and the slightly sweet, dried and salted eau of seaweed, purple carrot and sunny red tomato crisps ascends the room's various nostrils.

A squarish hand snakes out from the safety of the Sash, too. Its owner the Doctor looks up from between the dangling strips of golden bars comprising his shiny, not-so-bouncy headgear at the Master with a plaintive, pouty lower lip and asks, "… is that a Baby Jane chocolate bar I smell in your back pocket, or are you just happy to see me?"


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter Four: Redacted

The Master stands his ground, crossing his legs and shoving his hand down on the Doctor's skull. Finding a purchase in the rabbit fur flopsy mess, he grabs a sizeable chunk vaguely comparable to the dimensions of the candy bar in his back pocket, and holds the Doctor's head up by his handful. He begins to mutter under his voice, "How many times have I told you, I don't want you off-planet! You could lose the baby, be killed, or worse, start a dead-end Houdou cult around one of your old pairs of Chucks on bloody Easter Island! You're too fucking important to the Restoration, much as I hate to admit it in company. So straighten up!"

But the Doctor just stares at him with that soft face, that unsmiling gaze. That Mask he used to wear, back when they were children. His fingers, however, are curving around the Master's arse, diving for a pocket-kept yummy bar of chocolate wrapped in a fuschia and silver-streaked foil.

The Master decides to wrench the admission he's looking for out of the man. "Give me that- it's mine and you can't have it!" his vicious elbow slams into the Doctor's side, knocking him to the ground just as the Doctor sticks his own elbow out behind his body so he can lean.

The younger Time Lord flinches, allowing his balance to wobble, then rolls over on his back and applies slightly calloused hands to the buttons of his shirt.

"I have begun to hurt a bit in recent weeks, but that's just because she's growing again," the Doctor says softly, drawing in a hard, hitched breath or three every time the Master moves, and rubbing circles over his stomach as though reciting a poem. Then he adjusts his nearly-prostrate position on the flat floor, and crosses his legs out straight at the knee.

The Master looks at Borusa, then at Pasmodius, then at Rassilon, whose blue eyes skirt around the Doctor's outline as though he's going to take to the floor at any moment and give him a physical.

-But, why not tell him you never really left, young man?- Pasmodius' wordless gaze says everything.

Koschei of Oakdown, The Master, Lord President of Gallifrey, sticks a finger toward the Doctor's stomach and stabs at it, poking the man's swollen abdomen in vicious, shallow jabs, as though spearing at fish, his fingertips stopping only a millimetre in, enough to avoid any awkward questions.

In tiny, paint-water patches of purple, green, brown and yellow barely visible beneath the Doctor's white shirt, tiny contusions the size of the Master's trim fingernails begin to dot the Doctor's abdominal skin. In seconds, they grow up into scale blots like rotten mandarin oranges, then pale away.

"You think this is all a game? Well of course you do!" he rages, while the Doctor still says nothing, content to rub his side and make small moaning sounds every so often in the dark recesses of the back of his throat. "Ever since we were kids, you've never stopped playing, not once! I can't fucking stand it!"

"Kos…" the Doctor says finally as he holds up a tiny silver object between thumb and forefinger of his left hand, using his entire body to draw another long breath that shudders through even his –unused- limbs, despite obvious efforts to project stillness, "… someone's been listening in. That was why I did what I did. There's yet another spider in the web."

The Master's hand flicks forward; soon, the planted bug is crunching between his fingers.

"Thank you, Theta. You were with it that much, at least. But good god man, stop whining! It's not like you're in any real pain right now, is it? We can turn it off! We can. Be. Beautiful." he chokes, saying it softly to himself like a litany under the breath. "I will be… and so will Gallifrey, if I have to kill you to do it. You're a frivolous, dangerous, irresponsible child." His dark eyes flare up, softening only when they cascade over the baby bump stretching his dear friend's overlarge and slightly rumpled blue-pinstriped white shirt.

The Doctor just turns away, purses his lips tighter than the clasp on a certain golden clutch and covers his face again, lying back and flattening himself the rest of the way. Rassilon's eyes are on him, as well, so he looks. To his infinite suspicion and surprise, there is a refreshing, barest edge of sympathy there, hanging like cold dew from the tired, painted sill of a rainy window.

"I beg to differ, Lord President." Rassilon says, his sky blue orbs glistening gravely. "Haven't you heard him groaning under his breath for the past quarter hour? I'll take him to his rooms and settle him in. If it's what I suspect, he'll need bed rest for a few days. In fact,"

"I don't care! Do whatever you want! You lot are determined to undermine me at every turn! It reminds me why the Doctor left! And god damn I wish I could! But no, I had to try and be RESPONSIBLE!" the Master screams the last little bit, getting up and wrenching his foot out from beneath the Doctor's back -where he'd been propping him- before brute forcing the door panel and stomping out like a toy soldier on holiday.

Once he is gone, Pasmodius and Rassilon are kneeling beside the Doctor, one man pushing him down with a hand to the chest, the other gently raising him up.

"I'm… all right, really we haven't had much food and just need a little rest. After using the Board for so long, some sleep will do nicely, thanks. I'm all right."

"I'll take him." Rassilon murmurs to Borusa, and a crackle of pleasing fire surges out from the hand he's placed on the Doctor's spine, rushing through the nerves, filling them with a handsome sensation, similar to the cold-hot melt of ice cream being fried. To the Doctor, he says simply, "…there you are. A taste of the immortality you so despise. It will help you to sleep."

"Oh my dear word, is the boy all right? Someone should get his wife in here!" worries Pasmo, cringing and wringing his wrinkles as if they were full of dirty mop water.

His hands wrap around one of the Doctor's arms, while Rassilon takes the other.

The Doctor just shrugs, slumping on his feet and digging in, half-heartedly. "I'm all right, I'm all right, really I am! But you're not going to let go of my arm, are you? Humph. Well I never!"

As they walk together, his eyes trail along the halls until they reach his room, his hands on his stomach the whole way. It does kind of hurt, but they are really taking it too… ooh, question!

"Dallyrasse, do you think it might actually work, or are we just delaying the inevitable hydrogen inrush, among other things?" the Doctor asks with weighted eyelids as the older man helps him undress.

Pasmodius rifles in the blank wall cabinets for the sudden appearance of a glass, and fills it from a tap that melts out from the wall at a snailing pace. "I'll be just a moment, " he squawks in soft apology, "This area's automatics have always been a bit slow!"

Up-curving the corners of his sapphire eyes just enough to evoke a bit of calculated warmth, Rassilon shrugs, though it never reaches his eyes. He says, "… wasn't it you who helped me to answer that same query recently? I'll call for your wife- I believe she's in what's left of the gardens." Then he smiles, genuinely. His fingers tap a couple of keys on the door panel to keep the communiqué on private lines, then he speaks into the comm., "River Song, please come to the Lord Doctor's rooms at once."

Before he leaves, the ancient Time Lord turns to the Doctor and says, 'But the universe didn't begin with an inrush, did it, my Lord Other? You know that as well as I."


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter Five: Rabbit Heart Eurythmetic

The room is a bit dark.

"Well, my little red hen," the Doctor murmurs, with his face to the wall of his little darkened room, his torso uncovered by the sheet draped over his legs, "…I was only a little tired and now they've gone and put me on bed rest. How do you like them apples?"

"Well, my Johnny who's gone to the fair," River says, applying her hands to his shirtless back and rubbing a nicely buttered circumference into his shoulder blades, "… you know what they say. When life provides apples, one generally makes pie. And with the leftover lemon, who knows? It might be a bit sour, but you've always liked things tart. Do you want me to go lower?"

The Doctor nods a light, frivolous no with his hair, sinks a huge breath into his lungs, then heaves it out again. "I do so like a good metaphor. But don't forget the crumbly topping of awesome! Let's see, it takes butter, brown sugar, flour, some of that lemon you mentioned… what are you wearing?"

River looks down at herself and her eyes slip half-closed over her own form as her hands slide down a little further toward the small of his spine.

Her shoulders are bare, unsleeved; burgundy straps race cross country like wildflower street cars along her upper back. More burgundy flails in a miniature cowl-neck still life around her breasts, a tease of thick spa towel. The rest of the negligee continues down her musculature, tightening in silky ripples along the canals of her pectorals like a gondola through Venice.

"Made you look, beautiful girl." The Doctor's low, tenor chuckle returns her to herself.

"Oh, you!" She chides, but her hands find his hair, latching on like the myth of milking snakes. By way of that floppy brown fur, she travels through him- with him, for him perhaps, and soon, she imagines she has a pet bristly bunny named Endymion to snuggle with, for her head is pressed against his back, and her arms are wrapped around his body, her clean nails squeezing in gentle waves against his curve of hard stomach, adding her own light scratches to the Master's outburst of finger pointing. Writing lines in the dark again.

Definitely bigger now, she thinks, though not by much; Rassilon had been right when he'd called it a growth spurt. How much different than humans, really? One day, she'd ask him. But for now, another question.

"What do you see when you look at yourself?" she murmurs, her swollen lips smushed against his nape.

A pause, then, "…you mean other than that Flamina's grown a bit, I take it?"

"Tit for tat, my love; I want an answer- don't skirt the question." River says, fiddling with the tie on his sleeping trousers as though adjusting a fly for fishing.

"Easy question. Ex nihil, nihilo fit. Now I have one. Why did you plant that bug in…"

Her clean hands cease their dabbling with the corners of his slightly sweaty shirt; instantly, their precious little moment is lost forever as she rises from the bed, and his sense of smell leaves him, like a child off to school for the first time.

"Oh, of all the! Theta Sigma, you are the most… AGH. I'm going back to the gardens. And if you try to follow me, I'll tell Rassilon to chain you to the bed."

When she has padded softly out the way, and the door has slipped closed, the Doctor takes up a few of the thick pillows and bats at them, stuffing his fist over and over and over again in the casing full of fluffy down like the time lapse of a ricocheting bullet. Then he arranges the pillows across his lap and knees so he can lie on his stomach without juicing his displaced innards like an olive press.

A smile like delicate porcelain rests on his face as he considers his handiwork, as well as some blue flecks of paint from overhead. After wiping his eyes free of the paint chips and some sudden, unexpected hot tears, he lies down, easing himself into the wedge of pillows with his back to the chipped and peeling sky painted on the ceiling.

"I wonder," he says, holding his breath against the pillow under his cheek, "... how they're dealing with Jack in Research and Development? I did shoot him, after all."


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter Six: Radio Snow

Jack Harkness falls through the dark.

It is dark, because he can't see.

His eyes are open; his hand scrabbles out away from him.

His body is dead weight in what feels… soft… he feels like a rasher of bacon, wrapped in the exquisite texture of scrambled eggs in a place that should have nothing like that at all.

For he is on Gallifrey.

He remembers that much.

When a hand reaches down, he flinches as the fingers touch; he cannot help it. They are squarish, but long. They are cold, like all of them here.

There's something about them he needs to remember, but as the fingers fit themselves to his forehead his recall slips away- it's almost like being alive again, being mortal again- not like with the morphic field but really truly alive; he can feel his eyes blinking wildly, like little fog lights aching away at night down some lonely dusted road.

Then the squarish fingers of the long hand press against his skin again, dragging down to a place almost over his eyes, and retreating back through his hair.

The petting does not cease for some time. Jack loses count. The hours are like iced over fishing holes in this place, they burn with cold whenever he tries to find them. He stopped three days ago. Was it three days?

As he slowly sinks into sleep, he wonders aloud, "Is that you Benjamin?"

"…no." comes the soft, soft answer, like some hesitant father, somewhere. "…and it was four. Go back to sleep, now. I have to go for the moment, but I'll be back soon. I promise."

Jack's body sinks into the depths completely now, shutting down, the circuitry of his flesh in save mode.

To sleep. To dream, perchance. But mostly to sleep.

This day has happened before; it will happen again.


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter Seven: The Great Northern Cave

The Master throws his reading material down onto the latest pile of mouldy old books.

"Nothing but bloody love letters and a fucking museum orders list! Doesn't anybody around here KNOW ANYTHING about the little twerp? The moron who organized this section is batshit! Who was it? I want him MADE INTO GOULASH AND SERVED IN TIME FOR SECOND LUNCH!"

A hand-like fleshy object coated in a white substance saunters into the Master's line of sight. Slightly similar to a claw, the thing appears to be clutching a…

"Doughnut?" asks the Doctor with a naughty little innocence of a powder-caked smile, shoving another damn round of fried dough in his friend's face again as though he didn't just ask that very same murder-invoking question two minutes and six seconds ago. The infuriating man then sighs his content with the whole of his body, lifting up like a drama queen at festival, and proceeds to stick the first of five fingers in his mouth and suck off the sugary coating.

The Master thinks on this for a moment, tapping a finger on his scratchy stubbled cheekbone. Then the tapping stops before he does, and an idea puts words in his mouth, right there where everyone can see. "…oh you're not saying it's you. Don't say it. Just you don't say that, you whistle-brained waddling wintery warbling windbag! Wipe your mouth- you missed a spot you fool." He dips a corner of the napkin in his swirly glass of deep delicious bourbon, wetting the tip of the paper, then tosses it onto the Doctor's face, like a ring toss. Despite himself, an upward quirk of lip grabs him smoothly as the damp thing leaves his hand.

The other Time Lord blows out his cheeks, throwing off the napkin and grinning as he sticks a finger out from an advancing springy doll-fist and spears loopy fish in the Master's direction. "Ha ha! I knew I could get you to smile eventually!" He frees the napkin from the end of his large nose and swipes it across his teeth, clearing his lips with Olympic abruptness. Then the hand goes back into a pocket, one supposes for another yummy.

But the Master cannot smile for long. There is Gallifrey to think of. He fidgets in his own small pockets, each found hem a subconscious wish for the omnipresent largess of his friend's designs. He has them in all his jeans, save for one pair. "…mindful of the sugar rush, idiot." He adds, swiping the fried treat away from the proffering hand with a sweeping flick of wrist and elbow.

"Yes, well…" the Doctor says, smirking and turning on his brightest smile, "I have an idea, being as that I'm the one who cared for that particular section of the Archive. Why don't you try the…"

Slam! Skirrrrrr-ish!

Rassilon comes as near to crashing into any room as he ever will into the room, finishing the sentence in a swirl of brown fabric and command.

"… planetary tracking system I built into the Transduction Barrier? I've just done exactly that. It turns out there is an Artifact still on Gallifrey, in an area the Doctor is associated with. It's called the Cloud of Stryphfea. The events of the War altered its gravity, according to my sources." the tall dark Time Lord says, settling down in a sloping metal chair opposite the two other men in the room. "You have some explaining to do, it seems, -old friend-, being as that you were there."

The Doctor stares back at Rassilon; suddenly the mood of play in the room is dissolved, the Master dismissed.

And the Master does not like this, not one little bit. Still, because he is not a stupid man, he listens.

"Don't dismiss Koschei, Dallyrasse. He's a good boy, lots of charm and technical knowledge. And he's my friend."

"You said that about Omega too, and look what happened to him. Clumsy fool ought to have looked where he was going. That said, I can't imagine why you've suddenly started collecting toys." Rassilon's blue ice asteroid eyes flirt down and up with gutting the Master like a filet of Tafelshrew. Or maybe a fine piece of fabric ready for the clothier…

"I never approved of your use of him, Rassilon. In fact, as I recall, I vehemently decried it." The Doctor turns to the Master, whose normally insufferable bottom lip pout is scruffily absent. "You, too, Koschei. You remember when I crashed through the ceiling and played stupid with the shiny objects, don't you Kos'? After all you were there as well. You were so beautiful, and I was so proud to know you." He smiles a little. "So very proud."

Koschei of Oakdown meets the Doctor's gaze as though a shooting star has just landed in his latte. In other words, cool and sleek and usual. Usually flabbergasted, that is.

"…to –know- me? As in you –knew- I wouldn't be dead after entering the Time Lock with the others? Prat. I think there's an award for being the biggest, really." The Master waves his hand in languid dismissal like the last fish caught before the fry. "Oh you two don't have to mind me; please continue. I would have brought refreshments, but the Doctor has that covered. We had best check his pockets for jelly babies though- I hear they're addictive to prenatal brains. Explains a lot. He must have tossed them into the Loom during The Event at Lungbarrow." He turns, belatedly, back to the Doctor and says, "… on that note… you were –playing-?"

The Doctor sighs, then leans back in his chair and pulls a foot across his knee. He rests one hand on his stomach for a moment, then arranges his arms behind his head and settles back. He says, as he closes his eyes and turns his head into the crook of his elbow to sleep, "It might be prudent to send a team out there. And I know just the people. I'll tell you tomorrow." He pushes himself up from the chair.

"In a moment." The Master gripes, shoving a hand down across the Doctor's belly and forcing him back down. "What's funny is you think you're actually going. Where's your sense of duty to that child?"

The Doctor smiles. "Duty? Duty is as duty does. I care about your –girlfriend- just as much as you do. Now leave off- I'm going to visit Jack. And Koschei…" his eyes glitter like flecks of goldstone suddenly, and he watches the Master's upper body dart back in hindbrain fear, despite itself. "…touch me like that again and I'll have your head for breakfast on my best silver."

"…somehow I don't doubt it, Theta. Very well. I'll never understand you and your bloody mood swings."

As the two men leave from opposite doors, Rassilon grabs his chin and tilts his head in the Doctor's direction.

"… as always, you are a source of endless fascination, old friend. See that you don't lose sight of the goal, as I did."


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter Eight: Enemy Lines

The Doctor sighs.

"Ah, you're not going to tell us, are you sir?" the Time Lord Academy student at his right asks, holding up a black object similar to a pen that vibrates around and follows the young man's fingers like globules of water in zero gravity as he waggles them at the Boekind human in the antiquated medical bed.

The Doctor grips the side of the silvery slab upon which Jack Harkness sleeps. He blinks hard, crushing his eyelids down onto their moorings once, twice, as if rebooting his system from a crashed hard drive. Finally his lips move apart… they feel like two strange deer crossing a road in the night. There is a sensation in the air, as though nothing is going to get said. So he speaks as if from tick-ridden lips, giving the student a piece of his mind on a platter of silver, au tartare.

"Tell you what, Hainishtymion?"

The golden-haired boy smirks at the tiny dismissal, his whole face quirking in a line like a plaster mold of some impish little god on some impish little planet.

"Yes Doctor, tell me what indeed!" the boy says, looking up, hopeful, with pretty blue eyes like curls of swirling sky. "You know what I want to know. The other students want to know, as well. But you picked me."

The Doctor closes his own eyes again and thinks of all the images swishing around the boy, like muddy eddies. As he concentrates, he catches his breath, then leans down and finds the boy by touch and sense and all things visionary, grabbing him by the shoulder and whispering in his ear.

"All right then, my boy- you asked for it, let's see if you can keep up. This is your part of the plan. Steal a Time Travel Capsule and travel to Hitchemus. Seek out the White Lady. The night is your friend. There isn't any time for me to do it, because I have to leave tomorrow on the Mission to the Cloud. Are you up to what I've asked you to…"

Hainishtymion is already backing out the door, his youthful footsteps carving farewell roses down the hallway, to the Doctor's teary-eyed vision.

He sighs, because he's just proven, for the millionth time, that Time is a bitch, and 'I'm sorry, Hainish,' doesn't begin to cover it. Or should it be, 'I'm sorry, insert name here?'

Age settles over and in, like little cobwebs of infirmity creeping into his bones.

The poor boy never had a chance. He was only a hundred and fifty!

Still, he mouths it after the retreating footsteps.

"Oh Hainish, my poor sweet boy, I'm sorry! God I'm sorry…"

Hot tears sting again, and he slumps toward the floor in a heap, knocking his head on the edge of Jack's bed.

A smear of blood smudges across his face where he falls, like errant burlesque rouge.


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter Nine: Is This Your Final Fantasy?

"KNEEPANTS."

"Oh come now, Koschei," The Doctor says says softly, cupping the white substance of the newly-reformed Benjamin Pond Avatar and pressing into the belly, disappearing the unoccupied material into himself until there is no sign of swell. "It isn't that bad!" his skin begins to glow, turning grey then pinkish, then finally the fair peach of his normal tone. "Has River got into hers yet?"

"Yes I have, sweetie!" comes the call-out from a darkened crèche across the room. "You should check on Borusa!"

"Why? Is Bimbo Smurf too old to dress herself? And how come you can do that to your Flesh's morphic structure? We can't control ours like that!" the Master yelps from the youngest Avatar model's boyish lips, smacking the Doctor across the back of the Doctor's leg, near the knee. As he touches the body, the flesh-like substance undulates slightly.

"Because this one…" with a snap of his fingers, the Doctor's usual suit grows around his Avatar like a trick tablecloth, peeling backward over his bony frame. "… is double-routed."

"And I'm supposing, my love, that this double-routing has to do with how many complicated biomechanical substructures allow or inhibit the energetic connections between the ions in the artificial substance of which the Flesh is composed? Yours, therefore, has twice as many bioelectrical microbridges, for some unknown reason that you will probably never share. Is that it?" River smirks, coming up behind him and applying her fingers to his bum, the better to pinch him with.

As always, he squirms like an eel in the hand, only… his reaction ranges –into- her touch.

Taken aback, River Song cups his bottom once, then drifts back like a giant fey statue of bounding Artemis. She must be mistaken. There can't be a virus in the response-timing feedback mechanisms of these Flesh, the Doctor made them himself! It must be a stray aberration due to the extra programming he's activated- she'll mention it later. In the meantime, she distracts herself with the odd tinge of his bowtie.

It's patterned this time, with a print of Escher's famous stair. Quite painful to look at, after a while. She turns away.

"Oh god stop it please; I'll lose my breakfast." the Master pleads, grabbing his stomach, one wrist dangling a striped purple tie.

"Yes, dear; now stop fussing. And Koschei- that body hasn't eaten anything; they don't need to." The Doctor's reply issues across their minds, rather than through their ears, as he is busy now in another room, checking, one assumes, on the shuttle consoles.

"We're dressing as we go, kiddies! The bird is in flight! Remember the shuttle was set to fly as soon as we woke up; our bodies are still safe on Gallifrey!" Again the Flesh to Flesh contact.

So subdued.

"Is this how you are going to debrief us for the entire expedition, Doctor? Through Avatar to Avatar contact? It is a bit unnerving, especially when I have yet to discover how to access the higher motor control functions…" Borusa quips, one ivory hand sailing out to grab the corner of a storage door.

"Here, let me help with that. I'll resonate with you so you can pick up the skill more quickly." River says, reaching out to clutch Borusa's slender white shoulder, now well-toned and adult. The space of a blue spark erupts between their respective skins, and soon Borusa is standing upright and walking.

"I am gratified, Lady Song, that at least one of you has the manners you were born with." Borusa snaps, her yellow crystal-point pate spinning rapidly in disgust. "Again, my gratitude. Perhaps between us we can teach these boys some grace whilst on this fact-finding trip, yes?"

"No!" says River, her golden-haired head a forest of silent coins as she shakes it slowly back and forth, a small, tenuous smile rising on her lips, "… I think that timeship has sailed."


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter Ten: Ghost Ship

The screen seems to float in the upper left corner.

It's flickering again.

Rassilon grabs his smiling chin, tapping the fingers of his free hand on the console dash of the Master's secret comm. room.

Tap tap tap.

Tap tap tap.

The taps come naturally to a rhythm of five- he will not restrict himself to the little trick he played on the Lord President's young, impressionable brain; no, his thoughts reside elsewhere, with other people. Other matters.

His mind encases the locket, reaches for it, imagines opening it again. But for now, it will stay where it is- closed, dull against his chest, buried beneath his robes. The weight of a child's body never held. Never scented in the morning before those eyes of hers could wake him.

He could say his mind was absent, but that would be a lie. He merely considers what she might have thought. "Tzipporah…" he murmurs, tasting the name as though his daughter's moniker is a pale breeze off some alien sea, "… I wonder how you would have handled the Doctor's nervous little primate?"

Too soon, and he leaves her for an arc of weather across a viewing screen.

Intuition has never failed him; it has definitely not now, he decides as he feels a pulling desire in his gut to reach for the snow-packed relay, as if to wipe it clean with the cool warmth of his hand. Hindbrain mechanics. How irritating and one-dimensional. He snuffs that out, as it is nothing more than the blade of a candle between his fingers. And he makes note. If the little rats he ruled once ever allow him into the genetics bay again, he will suggest…

The snow of interference crawls louder over the upper left. It is not gushing, but just... lingering there, blipping like bits of fluffy seeds scattered by a sudden breeze.

The seeds are few now, but maybe with the Other's help, they can live again?

What idiot ideas. Perhaps he is just too old to relate. No, he should stop thinking. It got him into this mess. But he won't. To stop is to die. The Other knew that long ago. But, which one of them has forgot it now?

He laughs out loud. The sound mutates in his throat, burning somehow, becoming a scream that never quite reaches his lips when he remembers the screen again.

The fragments of mosaic flashing across like…

Yes. Like those little seeds again.

There seems to be a…

Fleck of leg in one fragment of visual. A leg in dark grey trousers…

The fragments begin to pull together in his mind, suddenly; if he was not a Time Lord, if he was the monkey instead of the cat, he would not be now connecting these puzzle parts in his mind. If he had not suggested to Omega to enhance their own natural kaleidoscopic sense of Time, their interpretive powers…

Another fragment of visual from the screen shows the sculpted stick of a firmly fixed leg and a well-trimmed hand, reaching down. The owner of the leg and hand is pulling a rabbit head into waiting arms. As from a newly-taken game bird, there is blood flowing over the sentimental biceps, as ribboned elbows wrap round encompassing forearms. The fingers fit like gloves around slack shoulders full of weight. They lift.

What has been altered, Rassilon wonders, from such earlier malice? Perhaps the monkey changed his mind.

Still, no Time Lord likes being carried.

Rassilon clutches his locket with one hand, grasping the silvery metal through his robes. His other hand reaches for the ground to ship locator… a little hexagonal button inset into a shallow square recess. Nice to know where the Master places importance.

He'll save that for later.


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven: Dude, Where's My TARDIS?

"So this is it, hrm?" the Master quips, running his open palm across the outside hull door's entry panel and locking it. "We're here. I suppose the other two idiots have gone to make camp or something. Lightweights. Theta, do you want to… what's the matter with –you-?" he asks, cocking his head and staring at the Doctor.

The other man's body is glued to the line of the continental shuttle, his jacket and grey shirted form fitted to the metal like a thrown doll. He's obviously leaning.

Obviously.

The jacket seems... muted somehow- almost as if it's sucking up the light.

The Doctor rubs his head and looks up; his boy-face scrunched into an old man's lines of pain. His eyes hang unseeing and open on the path ahead. His hands quiver uselessly at the ends of his forearms, like wretched grey stumps dangling water-rotted roots beneath the skin of some fetid pond.

Suddenly he straightens, and his chest is rising and falling like nothing else. High on life. The look of illness and confusion is gone. He reaches up and adjusts his coat and bowtie, throwing out his elbows with his usual swagger, then says, "What? Damn thing is malfunctioning again. I'll have to tune them with better equipment when we get back. Shall we?"

The Master knows better than to argue with him. This is not what he signed on for. What is worse, this is not the man he signed up -with.- Best to go along and see what comes of it, play the moderator once the answer presents itself. And if it's who he thinks it is, well… he won't allow it to go far enough to sting. When the hell did he become the Doctor?

"Do you remember where you parked the TARDIS, idiot?" he asks softly, narrowing his eyes in what he hopes looks something like jaded concern.

The Doctor smiles that cheeky shit grin at the Master and shrugs his shoulders elegantly upward and back down again. He says, "Oh she's somewhere back at the Citadel. I wouldn't worry. What's that look for? Trying on a new coat, are we?" he ambles down the dusty path, picking his footing against some small jagged rocks and a bit of loose brush. "We enter the Canyon here, then trail down in a spiral. Come along Koschei-I'm certain old Borusa has sand-beetles in his pants!"

As the man strides away down the narrow trail of high-jutting rocks, the Master wills a shudder from his muscles.

"God damn it, Theta," he mutters to the dry air as he takes a step, then another, then another toward the other man's retreating shadow, "…wake up soon or we're all dead. And then I'll be pissed."


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter Twelve: Over the Rainbow

As he looks at the man on the slab, the man he's just carried all the way down to someone's secret communications bolthole at this Rassilon's urging, Jack Harkness wants to touch. He wants to reach down, to grab the unruly chunk of rabbit-soft hair obscuring the bone-bleached face of that woman's murderer.

To… repay the man properly.

He wants to jerk this bony sack of a man up by that sizeable forelock, stuff his fingers through those staring peridot eyes like he's prepping a thanksgiving turkey, and slam the skull satisfyingly back down in a dent of reddish blood against the silvery surface of the antiquated slab of the portable medical bed Rassilon has set up behind their swivel chairs.

But Jack can't. His right hand is pressed against the reason why- a hard swell of inhabited flesh protruding beneath an alien navel… Benjamin Pond's swollen stomach muscles are stressing the buttons on his white shirt.

Hell.

The bastard's roughly nine months pregnant, in a coma, relying on ancient, jury-rigged equipment to keep things rosy for the bun in the oven.

Bastard. It's just like him.

A rustling of purple robes; Rassilon. Jack cops a smile as the canny old alien sidles up with the air of a general and the subtlety of a Chinese fishmonger – the Doctor's words, according to the rather wrinkled Time Lord called Pasmodius; he'd cleared the halls of lurkers for them. Obviously Rassilon must have wanted Jack to hear him approach, hence the sound. Hence his presence at all. So, he wants information… or wants someone to think he does.

"How is he then? The same as before I imagine, but please- feel free to expound."

The 50-year old face of a blue-eyed ancient war lord twinkles merrily, like an evil kitten while Jack tries vaguely not to blink as the Doctor's many warnings about the Time Lords come to mind:

'Don't make nice unless they swear they don't know me. I have that effect. Or better yet, don't make nice at all; it saves on the arrangements later.'

So Jack grins like a shark all over, fully aware that his –teeth- are like plastic fangs compared to this man's sharpened incisors.

"The Lord Doctor has warned you against us; I would expect nothing less of my very old friend. You said you had something for me?"

Jack meets Rassilon's boundless gaze, and tries not to shiver despite himself. He reaches into Pond's tweed coat and rolls his fingers on the hem, revealing the bug-wire he planted there during one of the many nights they slept together.

"You constructed the Transduction Barrier surrounding Gallifrey, yes? The Doctor, he…" Jack's eyes flit down, despite himself, "…hinted to us about that, vaguely. Well here's a little Christmas present- if you can buffer it enough and then loop it through the Barrier… you see the theory in play here."

Rassilon takes the tiny listening device and holds it up to the light. A simple little thing really; just a small silver dot with a wire hanging out.

"Yes… in future I believe I might come to treasure this low-tech piece of nostalgia- thank you Captain Harkness. Your planting this listener on him is especially fortuitous for us now. But what will truly impress me is if this little thing still works. I will be gone only a short while, but nevertheless, please notify me of any change in his condition publicly over the comms. In return, I will share a secret with you that you may find entertaining…"

Jack inclines his head as the Time Lord leaves, and then it's back to the gaslight vigil.


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen: Dead Man's Chest

"Such a view, Koschei…" The Doctor says to the Master, his long, squarish fingers squaring off the well-shaped heart of River Song's bum as she bends down to tend to the firewood. "It's good that we're building a fire. It can get frigid in the Canyon, what with all that gravity-related fun happening down there since the War; and that is a most delicious view."

He turns; Koschei of Oakdown's gaze is the hot kiss of breeze off molten lava. The man's big irises are brown today instead of grey, a solid pointer to the man's unwelcome discovery of the day before. Then he says, "I think we could do with a bit more of that, River," the Doctor smirks, still idly cupping her bum with his hands from afar.

Koschei smiles his little boy smile, pursing his lips like he's just eaten a persimmon. It's the only thing left to him in this small, inadequate body. Inadequacy. Still it will never be said that he can't use any tools at his disposal. He is the Master, after all.

"Really Theta, do you think that maybe you could focus on the work for once?" the Master murmurs, scratching his young chin with insufficiently small fingers then reaching down to tug at the Doctor's odd choice of trousers for the Georgie Plombkin Avatar. "It's refreshing to know that, despite your being in a Flesh at the moment, all those extra hormones haven't dampened your stupidity."

The Doctor smiles at River's bum one more time, then shifts to stare at the Master. "Really Koschei? Don't be so hard on me; I'm a sensitive man with burgeoning prospects, and in my fragile condition, I'm allowed a secret smile or two! In fact, I've been thinking -and River, you can chime in on this if you like- that perhaps, once all this silliness is over, I might regenerate into my previous body, you know, the one you fell for, with the bleeding and the bullets and the whinging?" The Doctor grins as he speaks those last words, through thinning lips that remind of newly-hatched grubs stretching over a corpse.

Well. That does it- much more of this charade and the thoroughly evil idiot who's wearing the Doctor's Flesh Avatar is going to be a likely candidate for the day's braining.

The Master cracks his young boy neck and settles his head on his elbow, somewhere very far away from the moron's disturbingly self-pleased gaze. He can't take this lie much longer.

So he doesn't.

He sets his teeth, quite fine and white, to the –Doctor's- stockinged and booted ankle, sinking each gleaming chomper in, to the bone.


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter Fourteen: Mamlaurea

Four days, and still he does not wake, her Lord. Her Other.

The nurse dwells on this, remembering another time, long ago, when her Lord had drifted in another kind of coma.

A coma of desperate, creative vision. He had stood over his many forges for days… crafting his great works of subtlety and molten metal.

Then, finally…

"Mamlaurea… I have a task for you… you are to be my special envoy to the Pythia and her Consort, to spy as you will -per my suspicions- upon the Pythia's servant Meghudi. She desires power."

Then he had given her the two gold rings, carved in the viney lines of roses. Carved through some unknown art by his hand.

How they had gleamed on the fingers of their chosen bearers.

With luck, and her task to-day, they might again.

And even further still, what debt perceived is now held tightly, she wonders, behind the eyes of her sleeping Lord Other, who spoke those words to her, he who once beheld these rings as nothing more than mere gold, before he shaped them with his hands and gave them to the two lovers, the two rings with which he would bear the two lovers through death along with himself.

She considers the ramifications of what she is about to do, as she reaches down and presses the burgundy velvet between her fingers. She folds it over the pair of rose-carved golden rings slowly, as if preparing a child's rump to wipe.

Long, long ago, she tended –his- bottom in much the same way.

With the same great care she places the packet of velvet in her dress pocket and then applies her shriveled hands to the drawer's silver handle, sliding the wooden drawer back into its recess.

She turns away from the chest of drawers, her grey eyes catching a swift glimpse of sunlight streaming in from her Lord's window as she crosses the room to the door.

Yes. After The Testimony before the High Council of Time Lords, she will visit him, and wipe his bloody nose again, just like before.


	15. Chapter 15

Chapter Fifteen: Marziplan

Bzzt.

Krak-fizz!

Brrzzzzt-tit.

Whirrr.

"Oh for god sakes, woman, just kick the damn thing!" the Master calls back over his shoulder to River Song where she stands at the box-shaped portable comms device they've brought with them from the shuttle, himself careful to keep both eyes on the man who bears such a striking resemblance to his friend that he has begun to wonder if he's imagining it all.

No, no he can't be.

The –Doctor- is leering at River again, his bone-white lips a sickening rictus of desire, his once-lovely crystal eyes little more now than pallid sea glass vases filled with damp flowers stinking of rot. He grabs at his face, as if trying to clear cobwebs from his skin.

Wait, is the bastard... ill? But the Flesh doesn't get… hold on a moment…

Blink.

Blink blink.

Ah. Ghost in the machine. The clever little idiot.

Suddenly, to the Master it seems as if by way of the –Doctor's- sudden weariness, the old gleam breaks through the filth, for a moment.

The real Doctor's watery gaze pleads with him from once empty eyes.

The sweaty eyebrows begin their dance- but always the eyes, they sing fountains.

"And I'm through! Finally. Hello, Koschei,"the dying light seems to say, "… you need to distract him like this until he breaks ranks and reaches the Cloud- it's there I'll make the switch... and would you please stop –him- glaring at my wife's tracts of land? It's really quite disturb-"

Then the Flesh's finger crawls up, cutting off the Doctor and hiding a soft shush noise with a bit of a waggle.

Most of their hopes gone then, in an instant. Damn. Has the Valeyard discovered the Doctor's meddling?

Along with his finger, the rest of the leering wonder returns slowly to life, with hand to dizzy rabbit head, hoping belatedly to halt the forward sway of motion which only just afforded the Master one last glimpse of a sea-eyed Kusabi made of glorified almond paste before the onslaught of insufferable boredom he knows is sure to follow in the Valeyard's spiritually small footsteps.

In any case, River Song's fingers are playing across the usurper's shoulders now, rolling out imagined kinks.

Oh if she only knew whose land rover she was steering.

The Master fights with himself at the sight, willing his body not to scream like a little girl in sheer frustration at this upstart clone of a Time Lord who thinks he bloody owns the place, walking around in his friend's Flesh form as if anybody ever cared about the shoes he's pretending to but him.

"I got a signal from the Citadel, finally," says River, as Borusa's big yellow crystal head floats over, on marble shoulders covered now by River's jacket.

"And I see that you finally got the hang of that turn, Borusa! Good job on, even if you do keep having trouble with the Laneet's vibrational speech synthesizer-much more problem and it might be better just to telepath it, and avoid the Flesh's comm altogether. Anyway, according to my husband, the Doctor, I mean the trail, will get a fair bit rocky from here on in." She turns to the Valeyard in his Doctor suit, he pretending sleep at her feet while his darkening green eyes gaze brightly on the Master's carefully crafted deer in headlights expression.

Wait. The Master thinks on the woman's gaffe, considering. Did she just admit she suspected something? But, before he can think on it further…

"You don't do worried liar lying about lying well, Koschei,"the Valeyard's traitor eyes call out merrily, dancing sideways after River's gaffe like a stiletto in the dark, with that vicious twinkle of ice behind tissue paper, "…although I have to say that -bothered- suits you."

"Don't make me bite your nuts off, you lacy twit." The Master growls as he kicks at a running coal from the campfire.

River Song lifts her head from the Valeyard's back and sighs. "And don't make me –muzzle- you. Anklebiter. That was Jack Harness on the comms, of all people. He said something about a murder, but I couldn't make it out. I guess the comms cut back in earlier than I thought. But when did he get here? Must have been during shuttle prep."

Anklebiter? Really? But Koschei of Oakdown has reason to smile; the mere memory of the fact of the Freak's presence on Gallifrey is enough to make him happy for the moment. He really –must- introduce the man to Braxiatel.

Later.

But… hadn't River Song been there during the shootout with Harkness? Then why was she…

Oh.

Quite a bit later then.

Heh.


	16. Chapter 16

Chapter Sixteen: Manifest and Manifesto

"And you say the latest batch of that fanatic's self-indulgent missives claims what? Let me see that, Pasmodius. They must be reviewed, in light of The Admission. To think the Other's Nurse was temporally frozen right above us, all this time, waiting in that transport pod…"

"Silander, your worry over your Cousin the Doctor is clouding your mind. The other Time Lords must not know of his failing condition through your lips or any other's. It would behoove you, I believe, to just read the transcript, please." the old man says, carefully perched in thought against the back of his rickety old wooden chair, his wrinkled hand to his chin, grasping his own skin loosely as if pinching a bird for the stewpot. The fingers of his free hand twist with impatience at the younger Time Lord as he calls out strangely, through…clenched teeth? "I rather think that I will close the door, as well. We don't want any troubles wafting in."

And then he smiles, does Pasmodius. For he knows what happens next.

Silanderedloomiscariotiquily lon holds the crisp and faded pages up to the lights, and begins to read…

'Hitchemus, month the first, timestamp apple dash one seventy:

I am Hainishtymion of Gallifrey.

As I state in my header, this is the first month of my being here, on the island colony of Hitchemus. The Doctor has not yet appeared to give me instruction; I count the days until he comes to brief me, because I know his work is important, much more important than the task he has given me here, although he would deny it if he heard it from my lips or glimpsed these humble pages! I trust him with my life, Goddess, with everyone's lives. He is a good man.'

Silander flips to the next page, a frown creasing his thin, youthful brow of tarnished silver.

'Hitchemus, month the third, timestamp apple dash one seventy:

"I am again Hainishtymion. A renegade band of the mock-feliform natives called tigers and their human compatriots managed to make off with the TT capsule which I used to travel here. That remains a troubling development, and one that must be rectified. I am having no trouble finding food, however, because the people here seem to know and appreciate what I am, they evidently having met my Lord Doctor before through a benefit of local legends… they call him the Hitchemus Devil, and claim that he, among other things, called a storm to stop the ancient war between the human colonists and the natives. The violin he is said to have played so quickly and so perfectly the strings themselves burst into flame has purportedly gained sentience from the incident, as well as a name, Kaku Inko, and several cult followings. I think perhaps this is one of the artifacts he sent me to find. I will attempt to investigate and procure the instrument; failing that, well… I must not fail the Doctor. I will not shame his trust or my House in such a manner.'

"It wouldn't hurt to skip ahead a bit,"Pasmodius quips, laughing as he taps the one scrawny hair on his head with a spindle-thin finger.

Silander shakes his short cropped silver hair and sighs, glancing down at the numbers on the pages. "If you insist, my Lord, but I feel that the record will be better suited by a…" By chance he glances down just suddenly, realizing that the old man's fingers have been soft on the door locking pad. "… ah, but this is not a formal reading for the Record, I understand now; forgive me, my Lord Pasmodius." He straightens then, knowing what will probably come soon enough, and continues. Pasmodius knows about the Doctor's connection to him, a lowly Citadel Guard of House Redloom. In his mind, a prayer to the Other, to the Doctor really, plays in a loop while he opens his mouth again to speak the next line from the letter in his hand.

'Hitchemus, year four, timestamp apple dash one seventy four:

I remain Hainishtymion.

I hope.

I pray.

Met a woman today; she gave me a strange kind of local delicacy. Powdered, white. The smell is…

She calls it the White Lady. Says it makes you forget. How could I forget anything? I am a Time Lord. Why would I want to forget my Lord Doctor, my most favorite instructor in the ways of solid argument?

It makes no sense.

The Doctor will come for me, why should I need anything to…

I hope he is well. Yes that is it. He must be unwell, and cannot come for me.

Yes. That must be what it is.

Silander skims a few pages ahead, watching the old man watch him. Death is at the end of these pages, he knows, and the only person who can save him is sleeping in a secret room fifty levels below the ground floor of the citadel. Again, he begins to read, considering.

'Hitchemus, year two hundred, month the ninth, timestamp apple dash two

I am with the White Lady, now. Her breath is on my face. All over my skin. Seeping in. Fulfilling me.

I must thank the bluish-furred Tiger woman Mira for introducing me to Her all those years ago.

It truly is a liberating experience, to sniff the white powder and watch it grind your brains up into meat paste from far away, inside your own head. I wonder how long it will be before I finally forget what I'm doing here. For him. I think, no, I know I want to. I am content here. I have the Kaku Inko in my possession, having paid off several of the local officials in black time market gold, both for the violin and information as to the whereabouts of my TARDIS.

He's abandoned me. Why did I ever think that he gave a damn?

Once I have my ship back, however, I believe I shall visit my previous home on the same unscheduled flight plan I used to come to Hitchemus, just so I can slip in and see if he's still there, playing with his irons and his fires. If not, I might travel back in time like he wanted me to, to have some fun with the Old War Era timelines. Get some answers. Maybe visit the Doctor in the timeline I left, rip the child from his belly and restring the violin with her guts… oh yes, that does sound adequate. I've grown quite fond of music, since coming here. I've even learned to play.'

With steady fingers, Silander closes the book full of still more pages and groans; no wonder the Doctor couldn't help Hainish. He was in the coma after hitting his head in his upsettedness, because he'd realized… that he would never be able to help that poor boy before he'd even sent him on his way.

Because he'd sent him on his way.

"Oh yes, I play quite well now, even do a little composing in his honour. Of course, the violin doesn't like me much anymore…" Pasmodius says softly, as he runs his gnarled hand over Silander's suddenly freezing shoulder, pressing into the extra nerve bundle and rendering him paralyzed. "I hope you like the third movement; it's my favorite. You see, it's the part where the Doctor gets to meet her. He's close to giving birth, down there in Rassilon's cramped little bunker- he needs someone to look after him, as he's in no fit state to do so for himself, you see. Such a good thing that I'm here… to take –care- of him."

Then the old man's raspy laughter fills the room like the popping of a balloon as he clasps his fingers around Silander's throat and slowly brings his fingers closer…


	17. Chapter 17

Chapter Seventeen: Stand Alone Complex

Red gold curls limp for lack of velvet splash from the quiet of the Pagoda's hidden crèche room, and naked flesh stings itself on cold green jade as something like blood begins to pump again through disused muscles made of... what had the Master called it once? Ah yes. Glorified almond paste.

Breath comes lighter and lighter, and so, so soon the Eighth Doctor's Flesh avatar crawls toward the small clothes cabinet sticking just off the wall to his left.

Grumbling, he roots through the leavings he's left himself.

Double blinds used to be fun.

No velvet.

A black jacket and a grey jumper, but-

No velvet.

Ah wait, what is that at the bottom, stuffed under the empty crisps bag?

His beloved green coat.

He slips it on.

Only half naked now, he stumbles to the console and deactivates the white pyramid standing atop the column in the center of the console room, then taps a few buttons on a wall reader. The screen shows a blip on the map of the Citadel, somewhere near a storage area.

"Ah, the node and the rings, excellent," he chirps, swirling around the room in nothing but his green velvet coat and some white boxers with red hearts on. And the nice warm dark socks- let's not forget them. Thankfully no one is going to be returning to the shuttle for a while; else they would notice there is quite a bit more room than before…

He talks to the console, patting it as he continues on pushing buttons, trying to get the little Pagoda to play nice and take him where he wants to be, which is in that storage room near the Citadel.

"It's the Cloud, isn't it?" he murmurs, half to himself, and begins to set temporal coordinates instead of mere spatial ones. "Well we'll just see about that. Take us to a place in time before the Cloud's temporal gravity was altered. There's my fine girl! We'll mosey on over from there and then hop skip back to this point in time once we've got what we came for. Bird in the hand and lickety-split! In order fix the rings, we 've got to have the rings… of course."

When he reaches the Pagoda doors, he flings them open.

The first thing he sees… broken columns of marble scattered against a shattered landscape.

Oh god, the Museum… he's gone and landed… there. And what is that, a little form picking among the rocks?

Rassilon preserve us, indeed.

He feels chill, suddenly, and ducks back inside. He retrieves his trousers from the cupboard, puts them on, and steps back out, waiting patiently for the explosion that he knows will come, because the Pagoda is parked right in the missing section of wall…

The boom erupts near his ear, ringing through him like the tolling of some monstrous bell.

His clothing is rendered into strips by the blast, like a sick joke played on a Dadaist.

His flesh is flayed bare-angry red streaks mar the Flesh's once pristine skin.

But then, he looks down… to see her staring at him.

In her hands, the Bird.

The silver ring is in its mouth, but with something Else fused to it.

The Eye.

Is it to be this way, then? He asks himself silently. He's got to get both rings somehow; perhaps the other one is in the cave… did she find the Node as well? If they are here, then… what is in that storage room? Unless they built the transdimensional storage around the… and rerouted it through the… oh my word. They rerouted it here. Those bastards. An oversight caused all of this, this… all of it.

With a small, lingering breath, he reaches down to swat her away from the bauble.

To save her.

To give birth to her nightmare.

Maybe he could use the other ring and the base-node to restore…


	18. Chapter 18

Chapter Eighteen: Virage

"Good Lord, one more day of you and even I would swear off sex. That's disgusting, what you've been doing with his sweets like that. He'll have to regenerate later just to wash the taste out."

The Valeyard draws a blanket up over River and smiles at the Master's grossed out leer. "Oh Koschei, get your mind out of the gutter. He hates the flavor of pear. I don't. In fact, I actually prefer the pear-flavoured jelly babies. Get over yourself. Food has been used in pursuit of adult pleasure for such a long time, it scarcely bears mentioning, this issue of yours. Besides…" he crooks a squarish finger across a narrow channel of rock leading into a ravine, "…isn't it about time we enter the Cloud proper? I know a short-cuuuuuttt…"

The Master smirks, then has to stick his tongue like a fu dog as the man's hand plops down on his head and affects a slight rumpling of the hair there. He mutters, "I wasn't talking about the candy. Why am I not surprised you've been leading us in circles? Idiot. You couldn't plot your way out a paper bag." He palms his forehead in surprise. "Oh god, why and when did I start sounding like him? And why do I want to know why?" the Master groans to himself, scratching his tee-shirted chest. "Let me guess, you want to scout ahead, with me. How thrilling. Let's go, at least then I can keep an eye on you, you pervert. At least you were decent enough to give me new clothes. Those blue knee pants were ridiculous."

As they both leave the last view of the camping area they'll get for a while, watching behind them for any sign of wakefulness on the part of the other two members of their party, they follow the stone dust-strewn path down through some bluish-silver brush with round copper leaves, their fingers close to the cool rock walls on either side.

"The way in from here is pretty straight forward, Master," the Valeyard says, his chest heaving slightly as he stops to lean on one of the long natural walls, "… in fact, I believe there is a clearing ahead where we can see the affected area quite clearly. It isn't far… this stupid malfunctioning Flesh, I'm going to decommission this thing when we get back- throw it in the pit, where the Pythia can have it."

"What is that, then? That underpowered Flesh having a bit of trouble with the altitude, you prepackaged git? This is better than Gamestation telly! You should pay attention- things have changed since you've been gone." the Master sighs in content, happy now that the Valeyard is showing signs of wear again. The Doctor's plan must be working. It -will- work.

"At least I'm not the one who likes bubble wrap. Pot, kettle, much?" the Valeyard quips, his mouth half open with the effort of breathing.

As the Master watches, the Valeyard's chest rises higher and higher with each breath, as though trumpeting for air.

Suddenly the man falls forward in a heap of tweed and rabbit hair, flopping onto the Master like a limp fish.

"Ew, get off me you moron!" the Master squeaks, trying to disentangle himself from the mess of arms and pockets.

Then the Valeyard lifts his head up, only to land it again on the Master's shoulder. The eyes gleam like an ocean of precious stones… but which ship is sailing that sea of flesh now?

"God damn it I said get off me!" the Master quails, scrubbing himself.

"It's… all right, 'Kos," the Doctor's Flesh says, rolling his shoulders and stretching as he picks up the Master's adolescent arm from his own adult one and dusts off. "It's just little old me. I've got him under for now. Let's go to the Cloud." He claps the Master on the back.


	19. Chapter 19

Chapter Nineteen: Machine Dream

"So…Captain…" Rassilon says, as he pours another drink for Jack from the white stone jug in his hand, reaching across the Doctor's unconscious body to hand the refilled cup to the Time Agent, "… Benjamin Pond set you onto an opportunity for employment at a museum on some dismal, decadent satellite. And what did you do there?"

Jack Harkness smiles a cat's smile, and takes the small stone cup he's been nursing, and drains it down.

"I think I already told you," Jack says, keeping his grin on, "…but for the sake of argument, I'll say it again. I worked there as a guard; I flirted with everything, everyone, trying to find out more about him. Then one day he shows up and murders the desk clerk. Wham bam, thank you ma'am. Bastard did it right in front of me, almost pleading for me to stop with those damn eyes of his. What would you have done? I don't know. But me? I followed him all the way here. There was a strange painting of a cliff near this building we're in now… an old Earth- sorry, don't you guys call her Sol III?- food dispenser was standing there, right on the painted cliff. That painting was strange- the whole cliff made of bones and flesh. Pretty place. I could almost hear the crunch underfoot. It gave the illusion of a rose-covered outcropping from a distance. All is vanity, I guess. By the way…" he adds, blinking his bright blue-grey eyes, "… that was it. You said you'd give me something?" With a cough and a hand to his throat, he settles back, anxious for a reply.

Rassilon smirks and sticks a hand in his robes; his fingers curl around something. He brings out his hand from the folds of his clothing, only to find what he expected: Jack Harkness clutching his own neck, with a hand straining, open-palmed, to grasp empty air.

"I'm getting to that…" the time Lord murmurs, drawing the white pyramid out of his long sleeve and cocking his pitch black head of hair slightly to the left. Before he speaks again, he watches the Time Agent's body as it slides to the floor. "It was good for you, I trust?"


	20. Chapter 20

Chapter Twenty: pas tout à fait une mortinaissance

"See there, 'Kos?" the Doctor asks softly, eyeing the giant, turnip-line roots of the inner canyon as he waits for his friend to circle to his own location among the spiral of crystal-threaded stones they've been traversing for the past quarter hour. "It's just that way; you can see the beginnings of the inside trail leading into the Cloud itself." He pauses, leaning on an upright stone. "Ah, I'm tired; all this double-routing and cobble-tooling is really wearing on me." he calls, tapping a finger to his left temple as the Master's dark toffee eyes come round the ridge and find him at last. "So, how do you like the view?"

The Master wants to scream. But he just grits it, balls his fist and stares out at where the idiot has jammed his fingers in a vague 'come see'.

At last- he can see the entrance to the Cloud near a strange waterfall of diamond drops; the silvery water is running uphill, as if a beach could spill skyward toward the lightning and still birth rare struck glass.

There are nests of silver-veined trees in the air, floating like congealed soup in mid-atmosphere. Like magnificent growing tongues, they curl and uncurl great fern-canopies of hovering ecosystem, footed with bits of dirt and dangling rock held in long, spindly dark toe-roots.

"Jellyfish…"the Master murmurs, enjoying the unique shapes of the tree line despite himself. It –could- be –him-, couldn't it?

"What? Come on, Koschei! We haven't all bloody day. The Cloud is just up ahead and we've still got to… what's that face for?" the Doctor sings out, swinging his arms in wheels, with his tweed jacket tied around his waist. "We've still got a few steps to go yet." His eyes narrow strangely, like the drooling slit mouths of two rabid dogs. "The Cloud must be breached."

And that's a no.

"I thought you liked them." the Master says softly, flattening his palm against his rough-stubbled cheek, sliding his fingers across. Staring, without trying to. He can't quite name it as amazement, but he tries to keep his voice steady; he knows how to do -that- well, at least. He breathes, "Yes, let us… do this now, while it is light out."

The Doctor looks at him quizzically, his green eyes seeming to turn surreally in their sockets, like depression glass cake stands. He turns to the Master as he's leaning for support against the crystal-veined rock and says, "You thought I liked… what? What was it? Oh, you're agreeing with me now? Oh that's special. Off we go then!" He tromps away, flopping his way across a narrow cut-through of the silvery, copper-leaved shrubbery.

The Master follows him, feeling a hot droplet sting his eye; he doesn't bother to wipe it.

The Valeyard is not here; he never has been.

But Koschei is.

He's always been here.


	21. Chapter 21

Chapter Twenty-One: There's...Something on the Ring

Rassilon reaches the double doors that lead to the Panopticon.

They would have been the reward to a long walk, a while ago.

Now, though, they simply loom, like old friends no longer recognised.

Strangers.

The Council has summoned him to speak today. Or was it to listen? Same thing, really, in the end.

They must know, then, about The Other. They have the Rings from the old woman, after all.

-He- must have known, must have seen it. With a whimper, indeed.

Rassilon places his big hands, hands he used once to write poetry to his wife, against the smooth interlocking wood slabs connected by intricate carvings of claws and winged women. Who would waste beautiful northern wood on such a travesty? He's never noticed it before.

Oh well, he thinks as he pushes the great doors open in acceptance of his fate, at least the Doctor has the endearing little monkey from Boeshane- and that idiot, Koschei. He himself has no one.

A very short time before this, he would have said he needed no one, either.

"These doors... they are no comfort to me now," he murmurs, sliding his hands off the inside edges of the widening vestibule as he steps within.

As he expects, one foot toward the inner sanctum and there are guards at his back and sides, holding his arms behind him.

He is pushed.

They walk him roughly to the little phallus of order hovering over the brink, the Eye, the false birth canal in mimicry of life which he fashioned with two other men, so long before this quiet day.

His unquiet dead lie rustling now, in the tiger-stripe forests of his night-brain, waiting to see him. To see what he'll already have said.

The speeches begin as an old man in purple, that wrinkled archetype, Pasmodius, holds up a page from another old book.

"You, Once-Lord Rassilon of no remembered House, have been found guilty of attempting to extinguish life..."

Rassilon drowns out their droning, for the moment. They are like bees, all of them. Buzzing with the certainty of their conviction, so easily come to, so hard to obtain.

Bzz.

Bzz.

Bzz.

Once in a while, he hears them murmur about it, or about the Rings. He feels movement at his back again; he laughs once, twice, three times like a chortling bird, full-throatedly, making sure to keep his teeth far apart, just like he's seen a certain bohemian scoundrel fond of scarves and little candies and the color blue do once...

"What sort of answer is that? Has he finally lost his mind?"

"I think so, Raskalin- I think he's been driven mad from it all."

"On the contrary, my friends, I have gone there quite of my own accord," Rassilon murmurs as they read out more of the charges against him.

"...also find him guilty of treason, trespass, secretive dealings, political tampering, societal neglect, unlawfulness, social engineering... cruel and unusual punishment, domination of office, abuse of power, attempted assassination without the proper filing of intent, unjust legislation, unfair usage of public monies, underhanded tactics, and an overinflated fashion sense."

He adds, with one finger skyward and two guards clinging lest he make a run for it, "...and let's not forget a most unfashionable late-coming to one's senses. But as for me, I'm dying for a jelly baby."

Then Rassilon, the father of Time Lord Society, sits down in the middle of the cold floor and twiddles his thumbs.

He further adds, the pools of his eyes draining grateful tears like pus over the drapes of his white toothy grin, "That's all right; I know you haven't any. But there is an urgent business of the Doctor's that needs personal attendance before I go. Might I have a messenger and another bag of those fried bats? I suspect this is going to keep me from his counsel for a time, and though I am happy that he is alive to witness this chain of events, I will miss him, in the interim, while he recovers. You see, he's within a secret chamber somewhere below, in a coma..."


	22. Chapter 22

Chapter Twenty-Two: Latchkey Princess

It is, as is often discovered, a shared dream.

Flamina turns toward the door she has just opened.

White showers everything in triplicate, as though someone has spilled flour in mid-air and left it hanging. Little particles of the stuff clump to her skin, sticking to her surfaces in a haphazard map of rough, unpolished stars.

A chair sits in the center of the room, also covered with white dust.

Near the chair is a room number sign, its old lettering faded and worn. Two dark numbers grace it, a pair of ones.

Two feet, naked and long and wide, wait beside the little sign. There is a screw nearby, probably from the sign, because there is a screw still sticking in it. And the toe of one foot is resting half-off one side of the sign's edging. Tapping gently, a rhythm of four.

"It's really not so bad, once you get used to it," says the owner of the foot, who sits in the chair and does not move any more than this, the tapping.

"… hello, Daddy. Do you want to come out now?" she murmurs to the man who is the owner of the softly tapping foot.

"I do indeed, precious. Do you want some ice cream?" he muses, shuffling in his pockets. "Daddy's got some in here somewhere…"

"No you should eat it. So I guess the glamour you put on the Flesh is wearing off? Is that why you woke up, Daddy?"

The Doctor reaches out for her snowy head, and sets a hand on her hair. It curls a bit underneath and around him, floating about like a water-vine.

"Did he tell you to come in here, Flamme? I bet he did. Did he say anything strange?"

Flamina thinks for a moment, plonking down on a cracked block of marble diagonal to him on the floor.

"Well, uh, Daddy, he… really wanted me to come in here. I could tell, because he kept telling me not to. And he took your heart away from me. It turned into a rabbit. I think. He's silly. But you haven't been hiding from him. You've been waiting."

"… oh yes. For you, my Flamme," he sighs, then gets up from the chair, weakly puffing white dust off himself like a crochety old feeble dog shaking out drooping cheeks. His hands grasp the chair back, and feel the dry wood heave under him, the wide grains flying apart under the sudden fullness of his weight. "I'm tired of sitting here, anyway. It's time for you to be Born. Again!" His fingers light in her hair, but tousle her all over. "But don't tell the Christians. They got a bit excitable last time…"

Krikkkkrik.

Krak!

He sails spaceward and down, back through bits of jagged chair and a substantial dust cloud.

Conviction.

A white hand – or is it olive?- reaches; young fingers with crushed red buds beneath their dirty nails cling like climbing roses to a man's hand.

The seat of the chair becomes a box, smelling of death-salt and rotted water. The floor escapes him. He is in the cave again. He can see the pictures.

The darkness soothes.

The Darkness Beckons.

To look upon it is to be transformed.

But he is pulled by the white hand.

He does not sleep.


	23. Chapter 23

Chapter Twenty-Three: Radio Silence

There is a scrabbling at the door.

So to speak.

Jack looks down, ending a thought with- so Rassilon DOES make good coffee. Huh.- as he reaches out to still Benjamin Pond's fingers- he has the Pyramid in his other hand… could it be… causing that reaction, he wonders?

Those fingers, they are sudden and fast, scratching and scraping away like some horror in the dark. As he sleeps.

As he dreams.

He shouldn't be allowed that. But oh well. It isn't up to him. And the Doctor would have his head.

A sigh.

If only.

Rassilon's little tonic worked wonders… he actually got a bit of sleep after drinking that odd poison the man gave him.

It won't be long until the guards arrive, he thinks, so he decides, as he's weaving his fingers around Benjamin Pond's timorous long hand, to pick up the comm currently outputting to the bug in the Flesh's jacket. It jimmies a signal from the aether once more, as it has been programmed to do, piggybacking backward onto the Cloud Drop Team's comm…

Jack doesn't see Benjamin Pond's mouth form a single word as the man scrapes and strains against unconsciousness.

"…Mariamene…"

Neither does he notice the boiled jellyfish stain of amniotic fluid staining the man's trousers.

River Song rises from her camp roll, churning her shoulders back and forth like a turn of good butter before she blinks and looks over at Borusa.

The woman's eyeless yellow diamond head is gazing off… at the Doctor and the Master. They're not here.

What?

The Doctor's roll is a flat pile of bluish vinyl-look waterproofing bag and a dog-eared book or two stuffed in the ripped out hem. The thing is, truthfully, an eyesore, and thoroughly unslept in, judging by the kink on the fabric that was just about head-area last night. It's still there now. The Master was just sleeping on the ground, near the fire. Both of them, gone. It figures. They're together, after all.

"The comm is buzzing, River," says Borusa, trying to balance her yellow head against her too tall body as she weaves toward the general direction of the blaring comm, somewhere to her other left and sitting atop a box or two of provisions.

Borusa reaches out, steadying herself with the edge of the dimensionally-packed crate. The silvery button pulses a blinding blue.

Press. Klik.

"Hi guys. Any news? For those of you who don't know me, the name's Harkness- Captain Harkness. Yeah, I know. Not much going on up here, except that Pond's fallen and hurt himself, and Rassilon's been arrested by the local authorities- something about nine-thousand counts of murder and social fraud... anything on your end? I really hope your team gets back with good news soon, because we've… got a situation here. Pond's about to… oh shit he's…"

The comm cuts out with a spark.

"Oh, you're joking…" River says flatly, her eyes growing wide again, then narrowing as she turns her worry inward. She takes a breath, schooling her face into order. She won't grab her chest. She won't. "My husband can't survive a step out the door for milk. Still…" she turns to Borusa, who is already gathering their gear, white hands digging in bags. "I hope he's all right. The Master and the Doctor's Flesh are far ahead of us now. They need us right now, more than his real body does, despite our desires to the contrary. Have you got everything?"


	24. Chapter 24

Chapter Twenty-Four: Change in the House of Oakdown

Why is River's face in his mind, of all people?

The Master wonders her laugh as he watches the Flesh version of his old friend meander around in circles, tripping over little stones he would have seen if he were…

If he were sane.

"It will be now, if ever," he murmurs to himself, looking suddenly down at his hands.

His fingers itch to move, as if tiny golden scarabs are strolling up his sleeves. Using his flesh as a loo for their dead bodies, he imagines morbidly. A laugh brushes his lips.

This itch, this fervor to release, this golden irritation, he knows now, will never leave him.

It is, despite his former selves, that desire he buried along the lines of some dusty evening, so long ago, when he was made to look into the Schism, and all things Changed in the light of that darkened swirl of shattered mirror.

He allows this, this… Good… to flow, like a row of white candles burning swiftly alight the red runners of an Earthian church.

Desire floods up through his back, stuffing his legs with cool light that chills and comforts like ice on the tongue. Like the falling of snow on hot grass.

Is he steaming with it?

He steeps, like a piping teabag.

The itch drones across his shoulderblades.

Icy glaciers forecast themselves from his spine like augurs of ancient frost, pillaring out in spiral twirls from his shivering, twitching back.

His bluing eyes flicker over the Flesh-thing, still dancing in the dark amidst the failing connections between synapses, the dying lights of the crystalline trees around them now flickering across the spent face.

Soon this Flesh will die.

And Koschei of Oakdown will make sure it doesn't take anyone with it.

As wings sprout like beanstalks from his upper body, he wonders at the Flesh's melting face.

It is staring at him. Pleading. It is beginning a shift to complete hindbrain shutdown now; soon nothing will be left but a glimmer of the man he loves. And then, that spark too will fade.

The Doctor has shed his skin. And so must he, the Master. His heart is ice; his mind is ice. At last.

It looks like the poor Flesh is trying to cry, but the bits of its skin are drooping in sideways catchpools, trickling down over its body in white, soggy waterfalls.

He walks to it, wrapping his arms around its shivering frame.

The ice of compassion is melting them both now.

The Flesh reaches up with swaying loops of white doughy arms and clings wet fingers like paint to the base of his wings, clutching at shoulder muscles thickened by a few moments' clarity.

It pulls.

He lets it claw at him. He allows this, because… it is still the Doctor, albeit a small sliver of him.

The brook-babble of red-orange fluid flows between them as the Flesh rips off his wings.

He falls, and bleeds, while the Flesh spills away, up the rest of the crystal path, dragging bits behind stained with vermillion.

He imagines, as his numb-muscled, borrowed body falls limp into unconsciousness, that the same happy smile is now plastered on both their faces.


	25. Chapter 25

Chapter Twenty-Five: Snow Dance of taikomochi

In the dark of the secret little room, Benjamin Pond's hand is snowy trace on glass. He squirms, back-brain processes driving him toward some desperate need, a need the usual place in his conscious is not yet aware of.

A shining man smelling of rough gold and sex is above him, the dimple-chinned face hovering like a dangling leaf about to leap from a high branch. One arm is wrapped in a … cuff of leather, with a ticking thing on it.

Pond grabs the face in one hand, shoving straight out easily with his elbow. The shiny man arcs back, his head spearing the wall. He will not trouble anyone, for a while.

His body twists up, the power in his abdominals hurting his guts as he strains them loose from sleep- or tries to anyway.

He –is- still asleep. Part of him.

The part that is not, however, the deep part, oh that is very awake, and rumbling.

Rumbling with the need to shove something out.

The space between his legs envelops his senses.

Bits of flesh feel numb; they hang from him, hot, cold, dripping the wet of his body.

Below his stomach lies the problem.

He grabs his bulging belly in wonder, feeling the muscles squeeze.

More pain.

Below his stomach lies the solution.

As above, so below.

Or not.

His bare feet fly out, landing on cold floor.

His body has bled beneath his toes- he squishes them in and out of the mess, squirming himself in it. Writhing his long toes in his own thick juices.

Grapes… somewhere, a piece of him floats to the surface… a man in a tub, stomping little red fruit.

Grape juice.

Huh.

He remembers the sweetness of juice; it spurs a recognition of immediate deficiency, the need for sugar, and a memory of what's happening now. He needs to get above ground, needs to give birth, but not here. Above ground. Above… in the light.

The little room smells of recent exit.

Pond scents the egress easily, there are many smelly footsteps there, leading away.

Leading –him- away.

He follows, clutching his side at the sudden sharpness rampaging through his guts.

A big thing is tossing inside him, ready to be released.

But there is a string of web trickling outside, a glowing blue line of Time like the spindly wet gleam off a dolphin's back.

Doll. Fin.

More useless words.

He is leaking fluid.

Time to run, on wobbly, distracted legs. There is a place he must reach… part of him is almost there… far away, in the place with rocks and upside-down things. Shiny trees, too.

Rassilon… that bubbles up from the cauldron of his memory like bones from an old pool of tar- he must reach Rassilon… yes. Rassilon is the man he must… reach.

Panting through the hot ice chipping at his spine and lower torso, he plants feet forward, on and on, slipping here and there on a wall, bloodying things- a table here, a person there, with a couple of wet handprints.

His toes baste the floor as his body drains still more blood down his legs, leaving a grisly thick, clot-strewn trail in his wake, like bread crumbs.

Plop.

Plop-plop.

Plop-plop-plop-plop.

Gussssshhhh.

So much water along with all that blood… what the hell?

Swaying, he grabs a blank-faced woman in grey and throws her down to keep his balance, then ambles farther through the march of white hallways, stopping to rest against the silvery frame of a door only when his brainstem instinct buzzes –safe-. Something spurs him to raise his head, so he does.

There is a sign above some up-down stairs which reads:

CELLS.

TELEPORTER BAY.

LOWER LEVELS.

It is the ascending stair he wants, so he ascends, weaving his slow way to the Teleporter Bay, bannister by blood-slick bannister.


	26. Chapter 26

Chapter Twenty-Six: Camera Obscura

His hands, white hands.

The Doctor has done a bad thing.

White hands, soft hands.

Melting into clay.

Slowly now, the Flesh touches the beautiful crystals again, feeling their cold warmth seep into his bonelessness.

So far, so good.

No-one suspects the plan. Even the Master is in the dark.

And it –is- dark.

So dark now.

He pools himself in his white white hands, waiting for the inevitable.

Pour, and pool.

Pour… and pool.

And pour.

Weighing.

Thirsty cracks pervade his once hard torso like drying pot clay, despite his increased fluidity in other areas; he does not have long.

Soon the Master will wake up. Koschei… he might try to stop this.

As he waves himself through hanging bushes toward the root dangling just out of reach, he sighs and stretches his dripping hand out, creating a boneless arm unchallenged by such silly laws as physics. The limb extends out like a sickle, curving until he can almost… wrap his… strange fingers around a… twist of translucent-veined pith.

A little more…

He reaches, straining. His molecules are not exactly stable, and he must do this quickly.

Suddenly, a crunching noise behind him.

And strong male arms breach the precipice, caressing his back, pushing their strength into his.

Yes, sudden. And yes, he knows who it is.

"You figured it out, I take it?" he murmurs, smiling with half a mouth on a melted doll's head. "Good… on you… old friend. Help me with… this, would… you?"

A white mushy tooth pops out of his drooping, holey gums, plopping on the ground in a pile of runny white ooze.

"Yes, moron," an adult male voice grumbles from boy-lips hovering just behind his left ear. He himself has no hair anymore, and the back of his head is more the waxy remains of a candle than anything living.

"Yes, quite so."

And together they reach.

Longer, outward; the Master holds the Flesh avatar out toward the branch.

In the distance back the way they have come, the shuffling of feet through brush becomes a deafening roar.

The Flesh can feel his torso creaking, but something else, too. This little outcropping, so much weight…

But the Artifact, it's just a little further… a fog begin to swirl now, thick and bent around the place, heavy with light and the sound of so many footsteps. He does not remember it having such a lovely tinge- it's silver and tarnished and dented, like mercury glass.

Like glass.

Something snaps inside.

So does the branch.

But their tugging has brought the floating tree closer.

Something small and coveted tumbles out of an outcropping of rock and root.

Beneath them both, the swirling thickens, becoming a pool of whorls.

The ground beneath them cracks like thin reeds and they fall in line with the height of the cliff.

Tall they are, and tumbling.

He kicks out as they plummet, slapping something shiny back onto the ground with his foot's remains; the momentum from that push out propels them both toward the spiraling spatial disturbance below them, and then there is no air for breathing anymore.

They are in the Heart of the Cloud.

The last thing the Flesh hears before the winds of the Vortex embrace them is the welcome sting of Koschei's reprimand in his goopy ear, "…so tell me, moron- are there corsets where we're going?"

To be continued in The Crossing.


End file.
